Tyler Perry’s ‘Madea’ tops Cruise’s ‘Jack Reacher’ se­quel

Perry’s “Boo! A Madea Hal­loween” opened in the top spot with an es­ti­mated $27.6 mil­lion, edg­ing Cruise’s “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back” into sec­ond place, ac­cord­ing to stu­dio es­ti­mates Sun­day.

It’s the third best open­ing for a “Madea” movie, be­hind “Madea Goes to Jail” and “Madea’s Fam­ily Re­u­nion” and a sign of the char­ac­ter’s long­stand­ing ap­peal to au­di­ences.

To mar­ket the film, which re­port­edly cost $20 mil­lion to pro­duce, Lion­s­gate lever­aged the so­cial me­dia au­di­ences of Perry and his cast as well as pro­mo­tional videos like one fea­tur­ing Jimmy Fal­lon as Trump along­side Madea that ended up go­ing vi­ral.

“Tyler Perry is a movie star. Tyler Perry is a mogul. The Madea char­ac­ter has pro­vided box of­fice div­i­dends for years. It’s a per­fect com­bi­na­tion, Madea and Hal­loween right be­fore Hal­loween,” said comS­core se­nior me­dia an­a­lyst Paul Der­garabe­dian.

That tim­ing, along with the promis­ing A Cine­maS­core, should bode well for the film’s sec­ond week­end over Hal­loween.

“A Madea Hal­loween” proved to be the strong­est of the slew of se­quels this week­end, top­ping even the star power of Tom Cruise, whose “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back” took in $23 mil­lion for Para­mount Pic­tures.

It’s a far cry from Cruise’s suc­cesses with the “Mis­sion: Im­pos­si­ble” movies for Para­mount, but it did do sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter than the first “Jack Reacher,” which opened right be­fore Christ­mas in 2012 to $15.2 mil­lion. That film went on to gross $80.1 mil­lion do­mes­ti­cally and $218.3 glob­ally. The se­quel, di­rected by Ed­ward Zwick and cost­ing $60 mil­lion, will also likely be making the bulk of its money from in­ter­na­tional au­di­ences.

Com­ing in third this week­end was the hor­ror pre­quel “Ouija: Ori­gin of Evil” with $14.1 mil­lion — just the lat­est in a string of highly fruit­ful and mod­estly bud­geted hor­ror pics this year, in­clud­ing “The Con­jur­ing 2,” ‘’Don’t Breathe” and “Light’s Out.”

Holdovers “The Ac­count” and “The Girl on the Train” rounded out the top five with $14 mil­lion and $7.3 mil­lion.

THE AS­SO­CI­ATED PRESS

In this image re­leased by Lion­s­gate, Tyler Perry por­trays Madea in a scene from “Tyler Perry’s Boo! A Madea Hal­loween.”